Tuesday, July 7, 2015

The Caine Prize Winner shares her prize money among her fellow shortlisted writers.

Speaking to the Monitor after the prize ceremony, Serpell praised the
form. “For me the short story is a feminist form, and that’s for a very
simple reason: women often don’t have time to write in more than short
bursts, and short stories are more amenable to that than novels. Because
it’s so contained, it’s also a form that has the potential to be
extremely powerful as a form of political and social critique.”

Monday, July 6, 2015

At the October 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Perth,
Australia, British Prime Minister David Cameron told African leaders
that if they resisted homosexuality in their countries, they risked
losing aid money from the United Kingdom. Those words registered quite
highly on the scale of African indignation. From Ghana to Zimbabwe to
Uganda, commentators, columnists and government officials encouraged
Cameron to zoom off to hell with his aid.

Saturday, July 4, 2015

In November last year, I joined Chinelo Okparanta, author of the
collection Happiness, Like Water, on a panel called “In This Way Comes Morning:
New Writing of the West African Diaspora”. It was the second of a series. (Note:
where the other six readings matched writers on the basis of their writing, for
example Claire Vaye Watkins and Ruth Ozeki on “Weaving Fact into Fiction”, we
were paired for our African-ness alone.) At the reception, Okparanta spoke of a
reader who criticised her story “Runs Girl” for its depiction of a Nigerian
hospital plagued by power outages. Okparanta, who lives in Maryland, spent
weeks with her aunt in a Port Harcourt hospital; she explained that her
description was accurate. The reader was implacable. “You’re writing poverty
porn,” he insisted.